some to be "a relic of the heathen sacrifice to Pomona."

Herrick sings,--

"Wassaile the trees that they may beare
You many a plum and many a peare;
For more or less fruits they will bring
As you so give them wassailing."

Our poets have as yet a better right to sing of cider than of wine;
but it behooves them to sing better than English Phillips did, else
they will do no credit to their Muse.





THE WILD APPLE.




So much for the more civilized apple-trees (urbaniores, as Pliny
calls them). I love better to go through the old orchards of
ungrafted apple-trees, at whatever season of the year,--so
irregularly planted: sometimes two trees standing close together;
and the rows so devious that you would think that they not only had
grown while the owner was sleeping, but had been set out by him in a
somnambulic state. The rows of grafted fruit will never tempt me to
wander amid them like these. But I now, alas, speak rather from